


He used to fly, why bother crossing the road?

by orphan_account



Series: Post Sburb [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, basically its after the game and shit, post!sburb, pretend they didnt get a new universe, pretend they just ended up back in the old one, three months after they get back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 03:47:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1454233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He tries not to count the seconds, but he is time, and time can't be stopped. The distances don't get longer between each breath, and he's always afraid they will, even though they don't. His brother's respiration system is almost painfully correct and regulated, and it only grows faster from this speed. Sometimes it drives him a little nuts, makes him tap patterns onto his own knees, trying to get a pattern that isn't regular, that is only a pattern in that it repeats the failure of repetition."<br/>-------------------------------</p><p>Just a little couch scene after the game, a little bit of a miscommunication they've never voiced. It's a oneshot until further notice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He used to fly, why bother crossing the road?

**Author's Note:**

> Fuck yeah, first posted fanfiction on AO3.  
> Fuck yeah. Homestuck.

Summer reeks. There's a stench that hangs in summer air that isn't in any other, that drapes itself over the land like an oppressive cloud. It's hot and heavy, and there's the twangs of life that permeate spring air—except there's too much, there's always too much life in the summer, even the scent of rain is ruined in it. Spring smells like life, but it carries the addictive freshness, the promise of new starts that's felt from the cheeps of baby birds to the motivation to write a few verses, to actually get out of bed before midday and do something, anything. Winter just smells like a clean slate, a cleaning slate. There's no new material yet, but you know it's wiping away all the old, built-up shit that clings to the fabric of existence. 

Then there's fall. He doesn't love fall, but it's the easiest, the most natural season. In fall, he's not waiting for the wiping, watching the decomposer, he's not seeing the birth or watching the continuation of existence crowd around him like desperation. Fall is simple, it's the dying. It's the leaves falling, and the birds leaving, it's the steady death of the world around him, echoed in the slowing of the people, in the clothes they wear, preparing for a cold that they can't fight and they have to just accept. It's the preparation and the dying that get him, he's—he's time. He's time and he knows what's coming, when the seconds drip off his fingers like droplets of water, and the minutes linger on his eyelashes, he's time. Time and death go hand in hand, because time kills everything living in the end, brings it to its knees and watches it fall, doing nothing to help and nothing to speed it up, not an observer, but not the killer. That's him, that's what he does. Time isn't the villain, but it isn't the hero.

Summer's reek is pouring through an open window, blown into his face by the blades of a fan (blades that he knows go around about 5 times per second) the breeze is soft, and blows one strand of hair into his face. Then the fan turns, and the hair falls back, drawn into it's position by repetition. He's leaning on the couch, arms folded over his chest as he tries to ignore the scent of oppressive life in the air, and to ignore the heat that makes his shirt stick to his skin with sweat. There's a respective kind of distance between him and his brother as the television blares an add about something to chop up fruit, and the woman with long brown hair grins widely as she looks just above the camera. His brother's breaths are almost silent, an intake, an exhale. A few moments pass, an intake, an exhale. 

He tries not to count the seconds, but he is time, and time can't be stopped. The distances don't get longer between each breath, and he's always afraid they will, even though they don't. His brother's respiration system is almost painfully correct and regulated, and it only grows faster from this speed. Sometimes it drives him a little nuts, makes him tap patterns onto his own knees, trying to get a pattern that isn't regular, that is only a pattern in that it repeats the failure of repetition.

He can't do it, though. He's been raised on beats, the steady thrum of the bass in headphones, his brother's mixes, his own feet on the rooftop as he stumbled, a ready-quick jump to action that sounded like the base of a waltz. Then he became time, and it's only become stronger, the regular ticks of seconds, the off tocks of a minute, then something like a skip-beat every hour, where the silence of the missing second was more poignant than any half-phantom of a count. 

The woman on screen smiles a final time, and she's done. He knows the break between now and the show resuming will take another two commercials at least, and doesn't want to bother watching either of them, but knows he won't get up anyway. 

He can see, out of the corner of his eye, the shift in his brother's position on the couch, the way the shoulder closest to Dave turns down a little bit, as though preparing to welcome attention in his direction. Bro’s jaw shifts, the little bit of scruffy blond hair that clings to it moves as well, and the words are obviously on his brother's lips.

 

 _Don't fucking say it,_ he thinks as his brother starts,  _let's not do this._

 

"Dave," his brother says, and the former Hero of Time can feel his heart sinking into his chest, drowning in the only air he can pull in, the thick, heavy, reeking scented air of summer. 

"Sup, Bro." Dave returns, not a question, toneless. A silent plea to just shut the fuck up and enjoy the awful commercials and the fetor of summer air.

"It's been three fucking months, man." Bro says, and Dave bristles a little, index finger tracing fractured patterns into the jutting bone of his wrist.

“Jesus, I know. That month is just up and primed for some copulation, man, getting down and dirty with September, which is a slut and all the other months know it." He says, and it's weak. He knows it, Bro knows it. Bro doesn't call him out on it, but he doesn't stop, either.

"You want to talk about it." It's not even subtle, Dave could laugh right there, if he was anyone else. He's not even being asked to talk about it, or being gently persuaded, if that sentence was a question, maybe. Maybe that'd be polite, but there's no way Bro would ever go for that. It's little more than a command. Does Dave want to talk about it? No. Yes—sometimes. Sometimes he wants to talk about it so badly he can feel the words crawling up his throat like vomit, until he works himself up over it so much that it actually becomes the need to wretch, and he's leaning over the toilet, arms braced on either side of the clean basin of the toilet, spilling his guts into that instead of words. The walls of the apartment aren't paper thin, and he knows that Bro is aware of this. He'd make no sign of it, offer no help or clean towel (Dave would never want it anyway, the idea of asking for help with this sickens him, and it's something that Bro picked up on pretty quickly). He knows, though. He knows, and Dave knows, and they both know that the other is entirely aware.

"I wanna talk about your _mad_ lack of common decency, you rude motherfucker, go back to preschool and learn not to shove kids." Dave shoots back, each word carefully plucked from an overflowing brim as he catches the hang of talking again.

"I'll stop shoving you when you can get yourself moving, but if you're just standing in the road and waiting for a car to hit you, I'm gonna fuckin' shove you."

"I ain't in the road, man, I'm sitting on the park on the other side, goin' back and forth like a pendulum on that shitty swing with the chain and the plastic little seat, and you're shoving me off, you playground bully. God, did somebody miss their mini-muffins and nap-time?" He quips, trying not to shift uneasily. Bro doesn't move, still as a statue and as impassive as one too.

Sometimes, now, he can see through Bro's facade. It was easier after the game (after meeting the younger Bro that wasn’t quite him), picking out the little cues. The movement of his jaw and mostly the way he positions his shoulders. It's not like it is with Jade or John, or even Rose, but at least he's got a cue now, at least he knows what he's headed for when he sees the shoulders raise, when the muscles just in front of Bro's ear tighten like a cord. Now, though, he's placid, staring at the television, physically mute. The muscles in his jaw aren't speaking, and the posture of his shoulders is vague and it whispers at best.

"You haven't even crossed halfway, kid." He says, and Dave turns away, maybe a couple of years ago he would have grimaced, but now he's just as blank as his brother. 

"Don't act like you made it there, dude, you got your foot caught in the drain grate. Fell down flat and got your ass run over." 

"We talkin' about me?" Bro asks with that partially-there accent of his, the one that picks out certain words to round out and leaves others sharp as hell, cutting through the rest of the shit like blades.

"Maybe we should, dickhead. Still don't know how you knew where to pick up the tiny little meteor shit. Still don't know what happened to you pre-me. Still don't know why you're such an asshole. Did you know you never told me your fuckin' name, man?"

"It's Bro." He says, curtly, boredly, as though he's lived this conversation a thousand times, which he sort of has. Dave eventually figured out his brother's name couldn't be Bro, and when he told Bro that, the man laughed his ass off and still didn't tell Dave, forcing him to hold onto the nickname because that's all he had.

"Yeah, and my name is just fuckin' 'Li'l Man,' ain't it?" The first inclinations of tone seep into Dave's words as he feels his 'ability to put up with this shit' meter decreasing as though a cartoon lumberjack is tearing it up piece by shitty piece.

"Lookit that," Bro mocks, reaching a hand over to ruffle his hair. "He's picking it up fast, _the clever little shit_. Only took sixteen goddamn years." Dave smacks the hand away, partially regrets it, but mostly wants to shove Bro off the couch and smack him with a particularly well-endowed smuppet. 

"Fuck off, man." He grumbles as Bro's eyebrows raise. 

"Alrighty then, back to crossing that fucking road, right. Start talking." Obviously he fucking thinks he won. Bro always wins every argument, this should logically be no different. 

"Come on. What would you even want to hear about, dude, it's all fucking _old news._ Older than dirt. Older than that prehistoric muppet sex ripoff shit you keep in your cupboard. I'm talking antediluvian, dude. I'm talking preexistence of the fucking universe. There is literally nothing to catch you up on, like, at all." He keeps leveling Dave with a stare, and so he tries to give one right back. There's about a good five minutes of silent staring behind sunglasses before Dave finally give in with a huff of air through his nose.

"Alright, alright, fine," Dave says, feeling as though he's just tossed his last safety line into a bottomless cavern. "Fucking tell me what you want to know, _Dirk._ " Dave articulates, and the name feels immediately wrong, despite them being almost-sort-of the same guy. Bro reacts similarly, nose crinkling and mouth twisting downwards as though he'd just dipped his nose in a particularly fetid shitter. 

"That ain't your name to use, kid. I'm Bro."

"Yeah, well, this isn't your story to ask for, man. Go stick your dick in a puppet." Dave replies, a little rush of confidence spiking his demeanor. 

"It sure as fuck is, lil dude. It's been three months, and it isn't close to helping if you just keep yourself locked up in that little room of yours all day. You're livin' static, y'ain't going nowhere like that."

"Yeah, well, where the fuck am I gonna go? Room works for me, man. And I'm chillin' out here with you, aren't I?"

_"I don't count."_

"What, so now you're a piece of furniture or something? You a couch, man? A trash can or something? Want that moldy pizza slice dumped on you? I feel that, people gotta live up to their destiny or something. Become the trash can, dude. Take in that moldy pizza. You are the trash can, it's-" Bro slaps Dave's shoulder with his fingers and Dave flips him the single finger salute and goes back to glowering at the wall.

"I swear to shit, kid, you're even harder to understand after The Game." Bro says, and Dave doesn't flinch or anything, but it feels to him as though a pit's opened up in his stomach. "You ramble a hell of a lot less, sure, but it looks like you've got the poker face down."

Jesus christ. Under some other circumstance, he might feel a little proud that Bro didn’t understand him as well as it seemed he did. He might be thrilled by the realization that he wasn’t as easy to read as a kid’s book, but this isn’t some other circumstance, and he just kind of wants to go boneless and slip through the crack in the futon like spare change, or like the remote when anybody actually wants to use it. 

Dave gives him the finger, and slips a little lower in his seat, his shirt sticks to the futon, and he can’t find the motivation within himself to pull it down around his back. Bro visibly sighs, his entire body shifting with the exhale. One hand comes up to rub at the spot between his eyebrows, and Dave can’t help but think he looks tired. Really fucking tired. If he didn’t feel like it would be so painful to just spill the beans, he would probably have been pushed over the edge by that gesture alone, but he doesn’t say anything. He tilts his head so his eyes are less visible behind the black plastic of his sunglasses (he still never takes them off, not unless he’s got to) and he watches, still worried, still counting each breath. One in, one out. One in, one out. He’s good. He’s almost always good. There’s really no reason to keep being concerned, especially since it’s already been three months. Bro’s right, he’s always fucking right.

“C’mon, give me something to work with, kid. I don’t like being the chatty one, that’s your shit. Anything.”

“Lay off, man. It’s good.”

“Yeah, so good that you clam up and give me the finger whenever we talk about it. Jesus, why don’t we just give you a badge on your boyscout sash for getting over your trauma and celebrate it with a couple rounds of video games and strifes?”

“Go fuck kermit. I’m sure he’ll appreciate your dicking around more than I do,” Dave retaliates. Bro runs a hand through his own hair, then returns it to his face and massages the skin there again. He gets up, and his back stretches. He’s not really old, but his hair looks a little more grey than it did before. His skin looks a little less healthy, and there are lines that weren’t there before. He mumbles something close to: ‘Yeah, maybe I _will_ fuck Kermit,’ and heads for the door. 

Dave swallows, shrugs, and chokes out a response, something stupid about making sure the green frog thing gets treated like a proper gentleman, and Bro gives _him_ the finger, and slips out the door.

 

The next round of commercials start, and Dave pulls his legs up onto the futon, stretching them across the length of it, pulling them back to himself, and then sitting on them, then adjusting again. Across the road, an alarm blares, and it’s just the stupid sounds of a city. The sky darkens as night falls, and the oppressive summer air starts to ease itself out of his lungs. They’ll talk. He knows he can’t dodge forever, and he’s not exactly going to run from home, not when he’s counting his brother’s breaths when they’re sitting on the couch watching TV.

He’ll talk about it. Cars slowly leek through the streets below, horns honking in an unfamiliarly familiar way, aggravated and  completely cohesive with the city. He knows he’ll talk about it.

He breathes out the last of the heavy air and pretends he’s not a coward who’s making a promise he’s been making for ages.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm practicing with symbolism, I guess. No teachers to grade this shit, I've got no idea if I'm being to obvious or too sneaky. 
> 
> This wasn't even really a vent, it was just word vomit, and it's un-edited too. Ahahahahaha, whoops, sorry.


End file.
